Let's Make a... Deal or No Deal

Overview

Objectives/Goals The goal of my science fair project was to mathematically calculate whether or not the #Monty Hall Theory# is applicable to the game show #Deal or No Deal.# My hypothesis was that the #Monty Hall Theory# would not be applicable to the game show #Deal or No Deal,# and that in the game #Deal or No Deal# staying with your original case would be in your best interest. Methods/Materials In my science fair project the materials I used were a laptop, the online #Deal or No Deal# game, StatDisk, and Excel spreadsheets. My methods were to go online and play the #Deal or No Deal# game 100 times. I then logged in an excel spreadsheet the case I chose in each game and the amount I won. I put this data on StatDisk and figured the mean, median, amount of losing and winning amounts won, and range for the data. I then played fifty games of #Deal or No Deal# on the website, this time logging the offers. I took all of the Offer 1#s, Offer 2#s, etc. and put each set of data on StatDisk. I found the mean, median, amount of losing and winning offers, and range for each set of data. I used the amount of offer sets that were always winners to calculate my conclusion. Results After the 100 games, I found that the median amount won was $750. I decided to use the median instead of the mean for my calculations to set up the winner/loser system. This is because a few high amounts would skew the data. If the winnings were over $750 they were considered a winner, and if they were equal to or below $750 they were considered a loser. I determined the winners by whether or not they were over $750. In the fifty games I logged all of the offers and put these in the offers sets. My results that I got from my experiment were that 6 out of nine 9 of the offer sets were always winners. I found this in my control that $750 was the median in my data. I found that the #Monty Hall Theory# could apply to #Deal or No Deal.# Conclusions/Discussion I found in my experiments that when playing the game #Deal or No Deal,# taking the deal will always be in your favor 66% of the time. This is the exact scenario the #Monty Hall Theory# predicts. My hypothesis was unsupported, and the #Monty Hall Theory# is applicable to the game #Deal or No Deal.#

Competition history

• CSEF 2007 Mathematics & Software · Entry J1316

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Computational Sciences projects
• CSEF Computational Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2007 project